Sad news. Great American actor Paul Newman has died. His major films include Exodus, Cool Hand Luke, and Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. His period of greatest achievement in film was no doubt the fifteen years between 1958 and 1973, when he was Brick in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, and Henry Gondorff in The Sting. During this time he was arguably the greatest male star, and the most desired. He was beautiful and magnificent in The Hustler, and Hud. He had something of an Indian summer in the 1980s, with The Colour of Money, and the haunting The Verdict. Newman was a leaner, subtler, and perhaps more intelligent method actor, in the Brando style - and almost as big a sex symbol. His death leaves few actors of that era, and that fame and talent, alive - one thinks of, perhaps, Robert Redford, or Warren Beatty, as contemporaries, or near-equals - but neither quite had the acting chops, the gravitas, of Newman. He will be greatly missed, and is immortal on the screen.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?
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